There’s some big things happening at Hudson. We are undergoing transformational change with a new CEO on board and new web platforms to take the company where we want it to go. Many of the initiatives will take place in the digital realm of which I am the leader in our North America operation. I’m very much looking forward to the process of bringing on a new team member in our Chicago office to help us to innovate with all of the tools that are at our disposal. Check out the job description for our Online Marketing Manager position in Chicago, IL.  

Here’s a little taste…

Help build a top professional services brand using your talents as an online marketing expert. Hudson North America is seeking a skilled and motivated digital marketer to work with our line-of-business marketing managers and our web development team to build programs that achieve business results.

Catch the market upswing as we re-position our websites onto DotNetNuke, reposition our brand as Trusted Advisors globally, and position your interactive abilities as a centerpiece of the digital marketing department of the future. If you know more about thought leadership than online shopping carts, please apply!

If you know that you can rock this job, or you can refer someone else who will, please have them Apply. I will see every resume that comes into the Job Posting.

I spent my Wednesday at a Social Media conference in Rochester called SM2Day. The event was the brainchild of Ana Roca Castro of Premier Social Media. She brought in a very exciting slate of guest presenters including nationally recognized Social Media advocate, Chris Brogan and local CMO Rockstar Jeffrey Hayzlett. Here is Ana’s nice little story using tweets and an app called whrrl to tell how she got the conference together.

My head is spinning at everything I learned before, during and after the conference. Here’s my top 5.

1. Chris Brogan is the real deal. He has obviously honed his craft in a couple short years. He is an entertaining and humble speaker who spoke passionately of the need for brands (and more impoortantly the people behind them) to engage in conversation not target marketing. Does anybody want to feel targeted? I’m now subscribed to his blog and probably anything else he creates.
   Blurry iPhone shot with me, Chris and my signed copy of Trust Agents.
2. Jeffrey Hayzlett really believes in Social Media marketing for Kodak. From his complete support of Jenny Cisney’s efforts as Kodak Chief Blogger/Social Media Manager, to his team’s published thought leadership within the Kodak Social Media Guidelines, to crowdsourcing product names via twitter, Jeff is passionate about Social Media to drive marketing at Kodak. We also found out a few other things Jeff is passionate about too like hunting, and Diet Mountain Dew.
3. Eric Majchrzak at Freed Maxick & Battaglia CPAs is making it happen with Social Media and SEO. He actually has a Twitter account for a CPA firm, and a forthcoming billboard that will post the tweet stream.
   
   He is also showing impressive ROI from his efforts by being able to attribute revenue to his website and increasing it steadily year over year.
4. Niki Black knows the ins and outs of the legal implications of Social Media on companies. Social media guidelines are a must. She provided some good resources on how to craft a good policy. When her presentation becomes available I’ll post here.
5. When you go to conferences and sit next to smart people like Matt Ray, you pick up extremely useful information. For instance, my iPhone battery was running low from all the in-conference tweeting I was doing on #SM2day. He suggested I turn off 3G to conserve battery. I didn’t know you could do that. I also hadn’t yet heard the news that I could tweet to LinkedIn. These are minor things, but it shows what hanging out with like-minded people will teach you.

I’m looking forward to the presentations from the conference being available online because there was some really useful content from ALL of the presenters.

Last night, Tricia and I attended the Rochester Social Media Club meeting at Solera followed by the Rochester Twestival at German House.

My reason for attending these events is to get more connected in Rochester professional circles. I work from my home in Webster for my company based in Chicago, so I don’t get a lot of face time with pros at my own company no less others in industry. I just want to feel connected. For Tricia, this was an opportunity to get out and network for her business, and get some face time with her husband away from our 2 kids. Mission accomplished!

We met some awesome people. It’s refreshing to know that Rochester has such a vibrant and friendly professional community. The Rochester Social Media Club, lead by Susan Beebe, Mark Frisk and Nicole Black is a gathering of people interested in the use of Social Media especially Facebook, Twitter, etc. Really, it brings together people with a diverse set of professional skills and agendas. The best part about this group is that no one is pretentious, because really if you share a lot on social media, CAN you really be pretentious in the first place? Nope. I’ll hope that this is indicative of all Rochester business people. I think going to some of these events in bigger cities like Chicago would be a bit more uncomfortable than the people here make you feel.

On to the Twestival
All I can say about that is, what an amazingly well put together event for such a short period of time! There were bands, raffle donations, food, drinks, all in a top notch venue. It rivaled any charity event I’ve been to, and this came together in 2 weeks. Most organizations take MONTHS to put together something like that. Charity:Water for whom this event raised funds, could not be more worthy nor more creative with this whole Twestival concept. The only drawback is that it could have used a few hundred more attendees to justify the time and effort that Matt Ray and his team put into it.

Here’s why I think attendance was light.

1. Rochester to begin with is a small-ish market
2. The bulk of the marketing relied on Twitter whose adoption is still really small even when compared to Facebook. This will only get better next year, and there will be WAY more people that ‘get it’.
3. People may have thought it was more about Twitter, than about a great charity, great music, and people. It wasn’t. Twitter was just the tool that mobilized a great many people.

The Rochester Twestival was a great event that rivaled any other city for its ability to provide a vibrant professional scene that motivates people to want to live and work here. Events like this thrive only with consistency and word of mouth, so I’d bet that next year will be even more successful.

Kris and Tricia at the Rochester Twestival

ROC Twestival image by @MatthewRay

For the last few months I’ve been using Twitter as an excellent learning tool. It has provided this work-from-homebody some much needed “presence” from other smart marketing professionals. It’s as if they’re in my office feeding me their expertise, even though many of them I don’t even know.

Another goal of mine has been to use Twitter to get more networked within the Rochester, NY market. After all, working remotely for a company in Chicago is great, but it doesn’t help me meet local professionals. So, I started following Rochester, NY marketing and IT professionals, designers, Kodakers and people from local advertising and PR agencies. The easiest way to do so was to find people in Rochester, NY on twellow.

Along came a ‘Tweetup’
On a whim, a couple of Steves (Hersh and Boese) called for tweetup at Tully’s on December 29. As it was retweeted about town, I mulled over the possibility of going to a good bar to meet some complete strangers on my holiday break. I haven’t been able to attend similar gatherings by the Rochester Social Media Club usually because of one conflict or another.

photo from Tom Collins

This was a fun event. Not of the epic proportions that Silicon Valley boasts, but a great way to connect with 10-12 great people over beer and good food. A few things I learned:

• If you tweet about bacon, you’ll immediately be followed by the Twitter Bacorazzi. Good to know @sbjet. Also, good to know that you are an HR Technology guru at RIT.
• Highland Park Diner serves peanut butter and bacon sandwiches. I did not know that, @Tom_Collins.
• @y2vonne has a ton of different local business events and blogs to look after. It’s going to take some time to read your prolific bloggery.
• I heard about Fat Pride for the first time from @AmpleAliveness. She has a very interesting perspective on life and size diversity issues. It was cool to connect Coach Ann’s interests with my wife’s Personal Training business.
• @shersh knows much about Oracle systems through his consulting business and shares my disdain for the current state of the Buffalo Bills.
• @KellyMullaney has a lot of web design going on and is starting up a twitter background design service.
• @AnaRC can whip twitter into a frenzy in online events associated with FamilyEden.com

I’m sure I’ll take the time to go to more events like this in the New Year. I’ve got no better resolution than that. Thanks to everyone who attended. I really enjoyed your company. Oh, and have a look at Tom Collins’ recap of the event as well.

I just wrapped up a post on IT Hire Wire on using Twitter to learn within the IT industry. With the majority of Twitter users still being from the Social Media side of the world (consultants, wannabe consultants, gurus, experts, wanna-be experts), I thought it was important to point out to IT workers how valuable an asset Twitter can be for their professional development. Now, to keep the piece short I focused on only a few ways to purely take from the network essentially by following smart people. I’m fully aware that Twitter is even better when you are participating actively. But, I think this level of extroversion and participation is still a turn-off for many. That’s why people should still get into Twitter just to better learn from those highly active members.

The reason Twitter is such a compelling professional learning tool is that you can be a fly on the cubicle wall of the best thinkers in IT. Think of it like the world’s biggest shadow program. Instead of reading another dry Ruby on Rails book, you can follow the guy who invented it, David Heinemeier Hansson, or sit next to Sam Stephenson as he programs with it every day.

Read the entire post here, and let me know what you think.

I’m growing weary of reading information created by the entire marketing consulting world. From self-pronounced social media experts, to agencies, to marketing vendors who blog, to the hundreds of marketing newsletters offering ‘5 ways to energize your online, social media marketing, personal branding spend, strategy ROI’, to mainstream magazines. It’s becoming overload. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll continue to find and follow more pundits. What I find myself searching for are people like me.

I want to find some people who attend conferences, not speak at them. People who read books, not write them. People who are building interactive marketing strategy for their company, not giving advice to others. This is an open call to all internal marketers to connect with me. Why? I just want to read your tweets and your blogs as you build your strategy. I just haven’t found you very easily on the social networks – especially Twitter, Facebook, and the blogosphere. But, I haven’t really been looking that hard either. All of the consultants flood the airwaves with their self-promotion so you haven’t been served to me on an over-tweeted platter.

So, today I started with a simple Google on ‘CMO Blogs’. I found this article from 2006 (*now that’s old news*) by Mario Sundar on Top 10 CMO Blogs. So now I follow Mario – the online Community manager at LinkedIn who writes an excellent blog. This led me to Eric Kintz who blogs about his work as a marketer at HP. He also wrote an informative post on why blogging as a marketer matters. That led me to dig into the work of David Churbuck, who blogs about his marketing efforts at Lenovo. He kindly outlined his thought process into his online strategy for the Lenovo 2008 Olympics sponsorship. He built a bold athlete 2.0 strategy that has value at its core, rather than overt company sponsorship.

Well, that’s my web wandering for the day. If you are out there, I’d love to connect with you, oh Internal Marketer. Here’s my criteria for the best connections.

Scott Allen guest blogged at Six Degrees from Dave the other day about 15 Creative Ways Recruiters Can Use Professional Networking Sites.

The way I see it, any hack can figure out how to type a few keywords and do a search — where it gets really interesting is in all the other things you can use the tools for to grow your business, attract more candidates and differentiate yourself from the thousands of other recruiters out there.

I’m happy that someone is turning the conversation about social networking away from “Does it have better candidates than Monster?” discussions, and its close cousin “How can I use Social networks as background checks?”. I tried 3 years ago to articulate what recruiting would be like when online professional networks became commonplace. I wasn’t smart enough at the time to predict exactly how Linkedin, Facebook, etc could change the dynamic within the recruiting process.

Unfortunately, the media messages and recruitment industry discussion of social networking sites often support these simple questions.

• Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting
• New goldmines of candidates are popping up on the Web
• Get Dirt on Candidates: The Use of Social Networking Sites to Pre-Screen

I’m interested in the use of social networking to provide maximum value to candidates. Along those lines, I support the following:

1. Recruiter profiles should be detailed and specific. The ‘mystery recruiter’ will be increasingly unable to compete against those who have made public their professional and personal credentials. Within the first 5 seconds of any recruiter call, you have already been Googled. If you’ve been hiding from Social Networks, you’ll get the big **click**.
2. Recruiters should prep candidates. Scott points out that you can send your candidates the profiles of hiring managers. Amen to that. If hiring managers want to know so much about candidates, the least they can do is let them peak into their backgrounds
3. Recruiters should friend candidates when the time is right. Having a Friending protocol to determine when they should invite candidates to connect will be important. I personally think that right time is after an in-person interview, or a second phone screen. Of course open networkers think differently. Whatever the case, an invitation to a recruiter’s personal network after some rapport has been built is a nice way to say I value you.
4. Recruiters should spread at least a little knowledge. Candidates should become incrementally smarter as a result of their relationship with a recruiter. A simple way to do this is for recruiters to share what they are learning about with candidates. They can use Del.icio.us or other social bookmarking tools instead of Internet Explorer favorites to save each everything they are reading about their industry. Then they can invite candidates to follow their feed. It’s not a blog, or actively maintained Facebook presence (which is far more time consuming) but at least candidates are deriving value from being connected online.

The time is definitely right to move recruitment away from using online social networks as purely another resume database, or sourcing engine. It is a game changer in bringing networking relationships to the forefront of people’s professional life.

So, cool story of how I networked with LinkedIn to someone who went to my same college (UB) with the same undergrad degree (Communication Design) and followed a similar path as I did to usability away from pure Graphic Design. Well, she has a consulting firm now called Sylver Consulting and I helped bring her in to Hudson to help us research our intranet usage. Well after Brianna Sylver and my team visited Pittsburgh to do our research she revealed the good news that she had an article published in BusinessWeek online. It’s an excellent piece addressing the meaning of innovation in the lexicon of different companies.

She rightfully points out that the term is so overused within corporate culture that you need to do research just to understand what that word means at a company before developing anything truly innovative. Speaking as someone who has “bring innovative marketing solutions to the business” on his personal objectives, there’s a lot to be said for simply understanding the meaning of the word in my company.

I have a lot of respect for Dave Lefkow. We worked together at TMP, and we both made the jump to another company at about the same time. I went to Hudson Highland Group – a staffing firm to work on recruitment marketing for one company. He went to Jobster to work on building a whole new type of recruitment marketing for many companies. He also writes articles for the ERE. I like his latest piece; a well-researched article on the talent behind the iPod.

Hey you know what, blogging is fun. I haven’t done this since May. I always suffer from a “who the hell reads this”, “I’m bored, but I’d rather read Yahoo news than blog”, “What’s the point?” mentality. And I suppose so many people out there go through the same thing. By and large it IS pointless. Especially for a married man that now works from home, puts in his time, and enjoys poking around with his kids for 90% of his daily entertainment. What do I have to say? My brain is burnt on work. For someone who never so much as wrote in a journal for more than 3 straight days in his life. For someone who latches on to VERY random interests at any given point, my blog is pointless. One day I’m interested in the Buffalo Bills, the next – in bowhunting. But, come to find out, there is some intrinsic value to this babbling.

My friend that I haven’t talked to in a while was able to find out what’s up, just by Googling me.

Dana Deskiewicz is doing really well in his budding Creative Director career and took the time to give me a shout out, cause of one little blog post of only 6 that I have accomplished this year. Well done man!